Background: Prescription audit aids in evaluating the quality of medical treatment offered to the patients. It helps to discern any effective changes that would support health care professionals to proffer superior quality of care to the patients. Aim of the study is to carry out prescription audit in the outpatient pharmacy department of a tertiary care teaching hospital. Methods: A prospective observational study was conducted on 500 prescriptions for a span of four months in the outpatient pharmacy department of a tertiary care teaching hospital in South Karnataka, India. All the prescriptions were analyzed based on WHO prescribing indicators and were evaluated for errors in prescription writing. Data were entered and analyzed using into SPSS. Graphic representation has been used for visual interpretation of the analyzed data. Results: Five hundred scripts comprising of 1,661 drugs were analyzed. The average number of drugs per prescription was three. The study encompassed 52% males and 48% females. Most patients were from the age group of 41-60 years. Only 3.6% (18) of medications were prescribed by generic names. Patients received 9% (145) medications contained in Essential Drug List and prescriptions containing antibiotics were 19% (97). Majority of the prescriptions were from Orthopaedics (18.6%) tailed by General Medicine (15.8%). Consecutively Analgesics (12.7%) were the most commonly prescribed drug class, among which Diclofenac and Paracetamol+Tramadol were usually prescribed, this was tailed by gastrointestinal medicines (11.7%). Conclusion: Prescription audit can be helpful to plan appropriate intervention to ensure the rational drug therapy and to evaluate the existing drug use pattern. It also reflects the perspectives of current prescribing pattern in hospitals.

Background: COPD is characterised by persistent airway obstruction in which better clinical outcome can be attained by appropriate management of disease. Adherence to COPD medication is poorly understood due to chronic nature of the disease. It is crucial to identify the barriers of non-adherence to build up and execute policies and interventions to upgrade medication adherence. Objective: To identify the predisposing barriers of medication adherence and to find the association between medication adherence and variables. Methods: A descriptive analytical study was conducted and data was collected from COPD outpatients. The Morisky Medication Adherence Scale was used to measure adherence and self-assessed questionnaire was employed to identify the predictors of poor adherence. Chi square test was carried out to find the relationship between medication adherence and variables such as age, gender, literacy, socioeconomic class, polypharmacy, delivery device and climate. Results: A total of 403 patients were involved in the study where 68% reported lower adherence. The most common adherence barriers found were forgetfulness (88%), intentional stoppage of medicines when symptoms improve (83%) and negligence towards medication (82%).A significant association was found between gender, literacy, socioeconomic class, polypharmacy, delivery device and climate. Conclusion: Adherence to medication regimen in COPD patients is poor, even though it is a preventable and a treatable disease. Well-structured education, training, counseling is required to overcome medication adherence particularly among illiterate and low socioeconomic class patients. The combined interventions should be used such as video clips demonstrations of inhaler technique should be given. Keywords: COPD, Morisky medication adherence scale, Chi square test.